The first thinkers we can find who probably did advocate complex Gnostic systems belong to the latter part of the first century AD, with a major efflorescence of activity in the first quarter of the second century – say, roughly between 70 and 130 AD. That chronology demands some explanation, but it does also offer some likely explanations of the forces driving change. Although Gnosticism was a diverse phenomenon, it was commonly rooted in anti-Judaism, in the belief that the Jewish God of the Old Testament was an imperfect and inferior deity. To understand this perspective, we have to pay due attention to political events, and especially the pervasive threat of war and racial violence in this era.

The obvious phenomenon that transformed every aspect of life, faith and thought was the Jewish War of 66-73 AD. This led to the Fall of the Temple, the end of the age-old sacrificial cult, and the devastation of Judean society. The number of dead probably ran into the hundreds of thousands, possibly more. That catastrophe had multiple consequences, including the destruction of the traditional parties within the Jewish world. That included the Essenes and the followers of Enochic ideas, who are so conspicuously absent in the founding texts of Rabbinic Judaism from the late second century onwards. Presumably the conflicts did not annihilate each and every thinker of those movements, nor destroy all their texts, and their flight outside Palestine might well have spread their ideas, although in new forms.

The crisis of Judaism reverberated throughout the religious world. The collapse of central control allowed the upsurge of many previously minor groups, especially the nascent Jesus movement. Such splinter groups were deeply divided overt the familiar issues we have encountered before, including circumcision, dietary laws and ethnic particularism. Meanwhile, the war hugely exacerbated tensions between Jews who supported the nationalist cause and anyone who could be seen as a traitor or heretic. The early Christians fled east across the Jordan, as did the followers of the Jewish Baptist sects that looked to John rather than Jesus. Facing the imminent danger of killing at the hands of insurgents, Gentile residents of Palestine were also forced into exile. (It is easy to forget that the Jewish revolt was not just anti-Roman in character, but also involved extensive massacres of non-Jews within the land).

For many reasons, then, we see a widespread diaspora of alternative and sectarian forms of Judaism.

Within Christianity, these multiple crises caused a major rupture in the historical continuity from the earliest church, and vastly enhanced the Gentile and Hellenizing element within the Jesus movement. The same years also witnessed the composition of the gospels and the New Testament. Throughout those texts, we observe the movement’s swiftly evolving attempts to comprehend Jesus’s mission in light of the wider debates about the Jewish people and their land, the Temple and its sacrifices.

Nor did the disasters end in the 70s, and insurgencies continued into the 130s. Between 115 and 117, a series of very widespread insurgencies are collectively described as the Kitos War, but are also known as the Second Jewish-Roman War. This coincided with Rome’s heavy military involvement in Parthia, and Jewish extremists probably hoped to take advantage of Roman forces being thinly spread within the empire itself.

As in the 60s, the revolts began with Jewish massacres of Gentiles, and ended with Roman slaughters of Jewish populations. Racial and political violence erupted in Cyprus, Mesopotamia and Cyrenaica (Libya), but by far the most traumatic events occurred in Egypt. A Jewish Revolt in Alexandria was followed by a brutal Roman reaction that uprooted an ancient and crucial community. That was vastly significant given Alexandria’s role as a second Jewish capital, and a primary center of Christian thought and innovation. Again, contemporary writers suggested that the numbers of deaths ran into the hundreds of thousands.

The continuing crisis culminated with the messianic Bar-Kokhba revolt of 132-135. The Romans responded by the mass expulsion of Jews from the land that the conquerors now renamed Palestine. These disasters further sharpened divisions with Christians, who were now definitively excluded from synagogues, and often persecuted.

That 70-130 period, then, marks not only a crisis within Judaism itself, but among movements that had grown up within the Jewish framework. We might usefully describe this era, in fact, as an interwar period, one that lived with the after-effects of one disaster while grimly awaiting the near-inevitable second phase. Anti-Judaism became more common, as did critical attitudes towards Jewish claims to exclusivism. Thinkers were struggling to build a Jewish-derived world-view without the necessity to accept the exclusive God of the Hebrew Bible, with his burdensome Law. Gnosticism is much more than anti-Judaism, but without that element, it is impossible to sustain.

Basilides, Carpocrates, and other Alexandrian Gnostics were working only a very few years after the suppression of the massive Jewish insurgency in that city. That strictly contemporary context gives a special force to the reported theories of Basilides, who described

those angels who occupy the lowest heaven, that, namely, which is visible to us, [who] formed all the things which are in the world, and made allotments among themselves of the earth and of those nations which are upon it. The chief of them is he who is thought to be the God of the Jews; and inasmuch as he desired to render the other nations subject to his own people, that is, the Jews, all the other princes resisted and opposed him. Wherefore all other nations were at enmity with his nation.

Nor is it coincidental that Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament follows within at most a decade of the Bar-Kokhba rebellion. As Stephen Wilson writes, “Gnostic anti-Judaism was unique, radical and deeply embedded in a significant portion of the early Christian movement” (Related Strangers, Fortress Press, 2004, p. 207).

Many of the religious themes that had emerged in the previous two centuries or so now became common currency in the Jewish and near-Jewish world. These included Dualism, images of Light and Darkness, a fascination with heavenly visions and revelations, interest in angels and mighty near-divine beings with great influence over the material world, messianic beliefs, and the exaltation of Wisdom to near-divine status. Also commonplace was the interest in the Creation and the origin of sin, a story told through the narrative of the pre-Flood patriarchs. We also find the tendency to frame those theories in Greek and Platonic modes.

We don’t know exactly who developed the Gnostic synthesis, but these political and cultural events give us the essential background. In the aftermath of the Temple’s Fall, and the subsequent generation of horrors and massacres, the emergence of something like Gnosticism was not surprising.

From a huge literature, one useful book on this era is Carl B. Smith, No Longer Jews (Hendrickson, 2004). Where I disagree with Dr. Smith is that I stress the endemic crisis of that whole era, rather than just the aftermath of the Kitos War. Miriam Pucci Ben Zeʼev offers a great collection of sources and resources in Diaspora Judaism in Turmoil, 116/117 CE (Peeters, 2005).

I wrote a thesis on this topic some years ago. To quote from the introduction; “the first major push for differentiation [between Christianity and Judaism] occurred in the first half of the second century. The Trajan [Kitos] War and the Bar Kochbar revolt are thereby found to be significant to the process, as they meant that, both internally and within the wider Roman world, to be associated with the Jews, by being identified as a sect of Judaism, became increasingly onerous. The success of Marcionism and Christian Gnosticism at this time attest to the desire for a Christianity with no ties to Judaism. These sentiments are found to have impacted upon the way in which the emerging orthodoxy differentiated from the Jewish people and religion. The question became not how much to retain, but how little, and what was retained was taken as an exclusive possession, not shared. Within this process, the Jewish people and religion became a doctrinal construct within Christianity. The process of mythologisation began. As the Church gained temporal power in the fourth century and beyond, this mythologising ceased to be mere theorizing, but became the basis on which the Church treated the Jewish people. By taking the Jewish scriptures, the Jewish religion was declared defunct. By taking the scriptures on the basis of Hermeneutics, the Jewish people were determined to be carnal. By confiscating the Jewish God, the Jewish people were found to be heretics, and by rejecting Jewish customs the Jewish people were seen to be aliens. The paper looks at how in each of these cases, the Church later acted towards the Jewish people on the basis of its own mythology, and how, by so doing, pressured them to conform to the Christian myth of what they should be.” Marcionism and Gnosticism can be viewed as movements within Christianity trying to see how far from Judaism they could go. By crossing the line, they showed where it lay.

Interestingly, it seems that hermeneutics, as an expression of philosophy, are able to both transcend and outlast specific religions. In Alexandria (which was more Greek than Egyptian – or than Greece), Platonic ways of interpretation progressed through Philo to Clement of Alexandria, and into Sufiism. More remarkably, Aquila, the Jewish proselyte, and disciple of Rabbi Akiva adopted his hyper literalist approach to the scriptures (even to translating the definite object marker), taught that the Bible was literal and that its prophecy was not fulfilled in Jesus. Aquila lived in Synope (birthplace of Marcion), and less than a generation earlier than Marcion, who taught precisely the same hermeneutic, but this time from an anti-Jewish perspective.

RoyMix

This is very interesting, and it brings to mind something I have long noticed but never voiced.

The popularity of gnostic ideas, and the romantic view of gnostics in the world today, seems very much tied with extreme discomfort with the Old Testament. It is so often associated with 19th century fantasies of Eastern Religions, that it neverseems to be noted that it seems very much a method of de-Judaizing christianity.

It had never really occurred to me that it arose in a time where many who were very attracted to Jewish ideas, and Christianity in particular might have been very hostile to Judaism itself.

My impression is that none of the gnostic authorities cited by the church fathers were of Jewish origin or background, the association with Samaritins might relate to this.

philipjenkins

Did you ever publish anything from that? Obviously that’s of great interest.

philipjenkins

Fair enough, but the only issue about detecting Jewish identity is that in that era, you can’t tell much from personal names alone.

RoyMix

That is a good point!

I think it is more of an ill defined thought than anything else, Thanks

Colin Austin Barnes

I never thought about it – I did find the topic very interesting, could you recommend any place to try?

philipjenkins

It very much depends what your focus is, and whether you want to aim for somewhere specialized and academic or more general. Without knowing more about it, it’s hard to comment more.

Andrew Dowling

“Within Christianity, these multiple crises caused a major rupture in the historical continuity from the earliest church, and vastly enhanced the Gentile and Hellenizing element within the Jesus movement. The same years also witnessed the composition of the gospels and the New Testament. Throughout those texts, we observe the movement’s swiftly evolving attempts to comprehend Jesus’s mission in light of the wider debates about the Jewish people and their land, the Temple and its sacrifices.”

This paragraph is so spot-on, and I really wish more people understood the trajectory of Christianity and its theology through this lens.

Preston Garrison

The first time I encountered a similar analysis, mostly of the fact that early Christianity largely succeeded in removing the offensive aspects of Judaism for “Greeks” who found parts of Judaism attractive and other parts not so much, was Paul Johnson’s History of Christianity. Very interesting additional points here.

While reading this I was thinking of the similarities of the Roman/Jewish situation in that era to the Western/Islamist situation now. I have to wonder if the atrocities of ISIS and Boko Harum haven’t now gotten to an extreme that will lead to their own versions of Masada.

Colin Austin Barnes

my appologies for this late reply, is there any way I could send you the article for you to assess it?